Can you afford the new gold iPhone, at $399 for the high-end model? Or will you be forced to take the $99 deal on the plastic iPhone?

(Let's not even mention those of you who are thinking of taking an iPhone 4S. Sure, it's now free with a contract. But what does that say about you as a person? It doesn't bear thinking about.)

The iPhone was already a divisive phone. Samsung has made a great business over mocking the snobbery that surrounds it. For Apple consumers, the choice has been simply, iPhone or "other" phone.

Now it's more complicated. Especially if you're a teenager, or a member of Harvard Business School's Society X, or anyone else concerned with status and class — which is to say, everybody.

Gold iPhones are going to be like a Gucci bag or a pair of Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses — they're going to scream your status as one of Apple's higher end customers, standing behind Silicon Valley's mobile velvet rope.

Likewise, those red, blue and green iPhone 5C's will announce their presence with a different message: "Can you spare any loose change?" They're expected to be big in China.

The history of all hitherto existing societyis the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-masterand journeyman, gold iPhone user and plastic iPhone user, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.